As of the beginning of Return Engagement, North America is a continent divided. Canada and Newfoundland, minus the semi independent Republic of Quebec, is under U.S. occupation which, as the Confederacy re-arms and the U.S. redeploys forces south to meet them, has come to mean occupation by U.S.-allied Québécois soldiers. To the south, Kentucky and Houston have recently been returned to the Confederacy by popular vote (with Houston also rejoining Texas). Sequoyah, having been flooded by US citizens, and its original Native American inhabitants having been disenfranchised, has voted to stay in the U.S., but other formerly Confederate territories occupied by the U.S. after the Great War remain unredeemed. In total, Virginia north of Fredericksburg and the Rappahannock River has been annexed to West Virginia, a sliver of northeastern Arkansas is attached to Missouri, and a northwestern portion of Sonora (purchased by the Confederacy along with Chihuahua in 1881) is part of an outsized New Mexico that also contains our current state of Arizona. The U.S. also controls the formerly British island territories of the Sandwich Islands (including Hawaii), Bermuda and the Bahamas; Cuba, purchased by the Confederacy in the 1870s, remains Confederate.

On an international scale, the United Kingdom and France, both ruled by totalitarian movements, are allied with the Confederacy, as are Japan and Tsarist Russia (Russia remains Tsarist; as mentioned in the American Empire series, the "Hammer" and the "Man of Steel" are defeated by the Tsar's forces around Tsaritsyn, a.k.a. Stalingrad). The U.S. is allied with the German Empire, the Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, while Quebec stays officially neutral but continues to supply occupation soldiers to the U.S. for now-exclusively-English Canada. Ireland, which saw independence from Britain at the end of the Great War with the help of the United States, has been invaded by British forces and there now exists a state of guerrilla war.

On June 22, 1941, Confederate President Jake Featherston launches the war with a bombing attack on all major U.S. cities within reach of the border, quickly followed by an invasion of Ohio from Kentucky. At home, he continues his campaign of genocide on the Confederacy's black population. Under Socialist President Al Smith, the U.S. must quickly gear up and attempt to prevent the CSA salient from reaching Lake Erie and dividing the country, though some (risky) lake shipping and the Canadian rail network north of Lake Superior would remain available in that event. Both Confederate and U.S. scientists are aware of the potential for atomic weapons, though one side appears to have an operational edge. In the U.S., Smith must put down yet another Mormon rebellion in Utah, which is surreptitiously aided by the Confederacy just as the U.S. aids black radical socialist rebellions in the Confederacy.

4=denotes a character who was a POV for the The Great War trilogy, the American Empire trilogy, and part of the Settling Accounts series
5=denotes a character who was a POV for the American Empire trilogy and the Settling Accounts series
6=denotes a character who was a POV for all or part of the Settling Accounts series only
† denotes a deceased character.